Amazon's New Kindle Fire Tablets Are All Ad-Supported

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"Special offers" coming to a Kindle Fire lock-screen near you, whether you want 'em or not.

By Jon Fox

Amazon is hardly the first company to focus on the positive during new product announcements, but the Seattle-based mega-retailer omitted some pretty major information at today's Kindle event, opting to squirrel it away in the fine print of a press release. All of the new Kindle Fire models, it turns out, are subsidized by lock-screen "special offers."

This isn't a new business model for Amazon: the bottom-rung Kindle eReader (now the "$69 Kindle") is an ad-subsidized version of an otherwise identical $109 Kindle. Of course, if you ever got sick of those ads, you could always pay the extra $30 to remove them.

But Amazon hasn't disclosed any such plans for the new "Kindle Fire family," suggesting that subsidies from special offers are built into whatever business model is letting Amazon set such killer prices on its new line of tablets.

So, should we all boycott Amazon? Not necessarily. It was maybe a bit misleading of them not to bring this up at today's event, and they'll probably continue to downplay it wherever they advertise and sell the new tablets. But lock-screen ads won't be a game-breaker for everyone.

Still, it's worth understanding that when you buy your next Kindle Fire, you'd probably be paying $50 to $100 more if Amazon wasn't confident they'd get that money from you through future purchases.

Will special offers deter you from buying a Fire? Or will you just root it and turn them off? Let us know in the comments.

Jon Fox is a Seattle hipster who loves polar bears and climbing trees. You can follow him on Twitter and IGN.